Bauer Entrepreneurship Students Win U.S. DOE Business Plan Competition

Published on May 10, 2017

Wolff Center for Entrepreneurship students (from left) Bryan Martinez, Kiran Meghani, Emmit Schultz, Arsheen Memon and Rishabh Jain took home first place and a $50,000 prize at the First Look West (FLOW) Business Plan Competition for Vescense, a nanocoating technology reducing the buildup of water film.

Five undergraduate students from the C. T. Bauer College of Business recently won $50,000 and first place for their clean energy startup at a U.S. Department of Energy business plan competition.

Undergraduate students Arsheen Memon, Kiran Meghani, Rishabh Jain, Bryan Martinez and Emmit Schultz competed against graduate students from schools including Stanford University, Carnegie Mellon University and the University of California, Berkeley.

Together, the students have launched startup Vescense, which focuses on commercializing a nanocoating technology to reduce the buildup of water film and contaminants on solar panel surfaces. The product was developed by T. Randall Lee, the Cullen Distinguished University Chair and Associate Dean for Research at the University of Houston’s College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics.

The Bauer student team worked closely with Lee to understand the business implications of the technology, Martinez said.

This is the third business competition win for Vescense, who previously won the Houston Maker Fair and UH business plan competitions. In addition to the $50,000 cash prize from FLOW, the team also automatically advanced as finalists in the DOE’s National Clean Energy Business Plan Competition.

Wolff Center students have the opportunity each year to work with researchers on campus through a partnership with the UH Division of Research, developing commercialization plans for research generated at the university. In the past five years, WCE student teams have won more than 30 podium placements in national business plan competitions and more than $300,000 to fund their ventures in the past three years.

“There’s no other university out there that gives undergraduate students access to patented technologies,” Jain said. “The fact that we’ve been given the chance to work with a patented technology that’s been tested so we know it works is an amazing opportunity.”